Blizzard’s Twentieth Anniversary Timeline

Posted By: March 9, 2011

A month after launching their twentieth anniversary “celebration,” Blizzard has added some more content to their anniversary page. It’s a very long (48 minute) video about the company’s history, which they describe thusly:

Blizzard Retrospective

Take a look at the history of Blizzard Entertainment, our games, and the people who helped create them.

The movie went up this afternoon when I was working on other things, and by the time I had a chance to watch it after dinner…. there didn’t seem to be any point in doing so, since the reactions from the Diablo loyalists in our (generally contrarian) forums are almost uniformly negative.

It might be going too far to call it a “Warcraft wankfest,” as one commenter did—after all, the video spends plenty of time talking up Starcraft as well. It is indisputable that there is FAR less coverage of Diablo than of their other game franchises, and no coverage of Diablo II whatsoever.

We don’t know whether that glaring omission stems from a lack of useful archival footage, the fact that all of the Diablo creators and almost all the D2 team have long since left Blizzard, lingering bitterness over the collapse of Blizzard North and the first version of Diablo III, or other interpersonal issues. We do know that it’s a very slick, well-produced, PR-style video that you’ll probably enjoy if you want to hear how awesome Warcraft and Starcraft are, but that won’t be of much value to you if you pay attention to Blizzard because they make the Diablo games.

Here’s the link; you can judge for yourself if you’ve got an hour to spare. (You might need to use MIE or Chrome to view it, as is usually the case with the Blizzard webpages, I had no luck viewing it in Firefox.)